Last year my husband and I sold our first home, and purchased our forever home. This new home, needed TONS of cosmetic work, and TONS of cosmetic work is what we did. We are finally at a point where we can come home and enjoy our house, rather than work on projects all night. Walking through our new home, there were some projects that definitely needed to be addressed immediately. The question I get asked the most is "How did you think to do that?" Most of my projects are created because something is bothering me or not functioning correctly. I see a problem, research options, choose one and do it.
Here are a few of the "issues" we had with our home and how we solved them
X The basement and back door run into each other when they are both open and our cats need to access the basement for their litter, food and water 24/7. When both doors are open, it completely blocks off the entryway to our living room.
! Cut out a cat door in the bottom of the basement door so it can stay shut when we aren't going in the basement. I was going to use a stencil, but then I thought it may be fun to try doing it free-hand, it turned out pretty good!
Materials used: + Wooden door + Jigsaw + White paint
The Master Bath
X Our master bath currently has a huge, ugly, obnoxious tub in it.The door nearly scraped the tub when opening it, and made you feel like you had to scoot into the bathroom. Since we can't afford to gut it at the moment, we chose another route.
! Install sliding doors on the outside of the bathroom. I used this blog post to achieve this project, BUT altered it a bit so that I could use two doors that split open in the middle {we have a large dresser to the right, so we couldn't use one large door}.
You must use a wooden door to do this project, no fake crap!
{We still need knobs on the doors}
Materials used: + 1 Galvanized pipe to match our bedroom colors + 2 Floor flanges + 2 Street elbows + Eyelet hooks (2/door) + Casters (2/door) + 6 Screws
Framing the Mirrors
X Both bathrooms upstairs were suuuuuper ugly. In addition to the glass doors on the tubs, the old fixtures, the odd window treatments and outdated vanities, the mirrors weren't framed. ! Frame the mirrors, I used this blog post for how to do this. My mirrors had the ugly plastic clips holding the mirror to the wall, so to fix that just simply replace the clips with these washers.
Materials used: + 4 Corner pieces of moulding per mirror {I used white moulding so that I didn't have to paint them myself, see here} + 4 Lengths of moulding per mirror {I used white moulding so that I didn't have to paint them myself, see here} + Liquid Nails - 1 per mirror + Painter’s tape
X Like I said before, the master bathroom was probably one of the ugliest bathrooms I have ever seen. The tub in the corner of the bathroom had gaudy glass doors surrounding it. We ripped the glass doors off, now what?
! The tub is positioned in the corner of the bathroom, which means we couldn't simply replace the glass doors with a standard curtain rod. I looked around and found some wire curtain rods, and thought we could try that. I purchased mine from Amazon, because I have prime, but Ikea's has good reviews, too.
Materials used: + Wire Curtain Rod System from Amazon + 6 Screws {This video helps understand how to install something like this, note this is not the same product I purchased.}